ABSTRACT
This chapter takes recursion as a fundamental – and uniquely human – feature of a range of cognitive abilities, including tool-making and use, abstract thought, mental time travel, and memory. Language is central to all of these and this chapter considers attempts to teach language to non-humans. The rearranging, deleting, and copying of universal genetic elements shared with other species created a brain with special properties. This ‘deep chasm’ argument is captured in Hauser’s term ‘humaniqueness’, which denotes the key ingredients of the human mind. The four major ingredients of humaniqueness are: generative computation, promiscuous combination of ideas, mental symbols, and abstract thought. Recursion is the repeated use of a rule to create new expressions. Combinatorial generative computation refers to the mixing of discrete elements to produce new ideas, which can be expressed as novel words or musical forms, among other possibilities.
